I would have said "SCIENCE" but I overheard my kid telling a yelling friend today "Yelling doesn't make it true." Going to have to reach deeper into my bag of parental tricks.
I wonder how this squares with the recent stuff about intermittent fasting? And gut bug transplants? It's all so fascinatingly complex!
It used to be only the squares at poop, but now everybody is doing it.
5. You should just say NEUROSCIENCE. (As the article tries.) Tweety respects that.
Just visualize being thinner and you'll lose weight someone will point out your image processing algorithms are incorrect.
GUNS DON'T MAKE YOU FAT.
DIETS KILL PEOPLE.
Everybody is doeing it. Artisan poop only from female deer.
GUNS DON'T MAKE YOU FAT
ACID IS GRAVY. FEED THE PIGS.
It used to be only the squares at poop, but now everybody is doing it.
SQUARES? TRY CUBES
I do wonder what the experience is like of having your metabolism drop like this. Not in relation to hunger, exactly. But are people in this position functioning well with a very low calorie intake, or are they listless and low energy and showing other signs of being underfed? Because if an organism could just drop its calorie needs with no penalty otherwise, why would we need all the extra food in the first place?
Since a huge percentage of the base calorie burn in humans is to keep our delicious brains running, I assume you could fund a big drop calorie use by thinking less.
delicious brains
On the internet nobody knows you're a zombie.
Unless you accidentally break your cover.
Fat makes food taste good. Brains are mostly fat. Therefore brains taste good.
QED
Oh, sure, try and walk it back now. You're completely busted.
Soon a pill is coming and everyone will just pop one and be skinny forever. Science to the rescue!
16 is exactly what I've been wondering.
I think it comes down to fidgeting, how much of the nutrition your intestines grab before you poop, and body temperature maintenance. That is, I've noticed that people who don't eat much tend to wear sweaters and keep their house warm. Of course, everybody I know who does either of those things is elderly.
!16: Wasn't there an actual study done on this, in or before WWII?
I remember reading about it. The effects of low-calorie diets on men. (They only used soldiers as subjects, as I recall.) The short answer is it's not good in the long term.
Lemme go google and see if I can add fact to vague memory.
Yes, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.
http://www.madsciencemuseum.com/msm/pl/great_starvation_experiment
Starvation and Spam. Minnesota has a fucked up relationship with food.
And things like famines. Do people who have been fat in the past starve slower when there's limited food available?
I blame genes that survived the potato famine for my own ability to gain weight.
I can't say for sure if my metabolism is slower post weight loss - before my weight problems I was much younger - buy it certainly feels like it; if I go significantly over my routine of 2400 calories a day, I gain weight pretty reliably. Not in my case associated with noticeable lethargy or anything like that.
That still seems like a reasonable number of calories. That's 19 Yuengling, almost. You can't really have any more and still hold a job.
30: if it makes you feel better, mine is 1400 with a little flexibility on weekends.
2400 does seem pretty generous. I had a vague sense that 2000 was sort of a standard normal diet for an average-sized adult -- not a weight loss diet, just where you'd expect uncontrolled eating to come out. Is that way off?
And googling says 2000K for women, 2500K for men. Not sure if the difference is different average size, something metabolic, or partially bullshit.
Different average size accounts for about half of it. Kleiber's law says that the average American adult male (87kg) should have a metabolic rate 1.12 times that of the average American adult female (74 kg). So there's another 13% increase that needs explaining.
I'm all about the life of the mind.
You're not fooling anyone, you shambling revenant.
You're making too much of the brain/mind distinction.
I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!
Was 32 posted by a man or a woman?
You're not a toy maker (as far as I know). You don't need to gender everything.
That's 2400 calories combined with a minimum 150 minutes of vigorous (sweaty-making) exercise per week, for further context. If you believe my tracker app, that equates to at least a couple hundred fewer "net" calories.
Still, it doesn't sound as if you're experiencing the same kind of metabolic drop claimed in the OP -- netted out with exercise, the calorie intake that lets you maintain your weight is maybe a little below average, but not alarmingly low.
Could be. Perhaps I could find a regression model to estimate my prior metabolism.
Claims like the one in the linked article, that the writer was maintaining a steady weight for months on 800 calories a day, sound like there's either something really weird going on, or they're not true:
On my most serious diet, in my late 20s, I got down to 125 pounds, 30 pounds below my normal weight. I wanted (unwisely) to lose more, but I got stuck. After several months of eating fewer than 800 calories a day and spending an hour at the gym every morning, I hadn't lost another ounce.
I mean, the Minnesota Starvation study was using a 1500K diet as the starvation level, if I read the linked article right.
(Again, male/female distinctions come into play, but that's not enough to make the claim in the article not very surprising.)
800 calories and not dying is indeed very surprising. By way of comparison, I had 900 calories for breakfast. For $4. Thanks, McDonald's.
And, while she's saying she was 30 pounds under her normal weight, depending on her height 125 isn't even alarmingly underweight. Looking at a BMI calculator (which, yes, bullshit generally, but just as a ballpark) she wouldn't have been 'underweight' at 125 unless she was taller than 5'9".
I think I probably average somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 calories a day, but that's not based on an actual count, just the fact that 1000 calories at McDonald's leaves me full and I eat until I'm full about three times a day.
By which I don't mean that 125 was a good weight for her, or anything like that. Just that it doesn't sound frightening, and months of an 800 calorie diet with an hour of exercise every day sounds as if it should have produced frightening, life-threatening results. If it didn't, either the metabolic effects being discussed are very, very powerful, or the story isn't true.
51: McDonalds might be less filing per calorie than ordinary food, because of the almost complete lack of fiber. If you're eating any unprocessed vegetables at all in your other meals, they're filling.
47: yes, I think that that's simply someone lying (or deluded) about how much food they ate.
800 calories a day is lower than a starvation diet - as in, it's less than what you feed people whom you want to starve to death. (eg in concentration camps). Prisoners in Auschwitz got 1300 calories a day if they weren't doing hard physical work.
Plus, this guy was supposedly doing an hour in the gym a day. An hour of slow running on a treadmill would burn 700 calories.
I don't care how many assumptions you make about intestinal microflora and metabolic rate: you cannot run an adult human body at steady-state weight on 100 net calories a day.
I do eat unprocessed vegetables but I figure only enough to offset the beer.
I hate to be skeptical of the research without having specific problems with the methodology or something, which I don't. But all of the 'dieting is impossible for metabolic reasons' stories do sound as if starvation should generally be almost impossible.
Come to think, Holocaust survivors. Systematically starved for extended periods of time, resulting in a great deal of weight loss. And then lived the rest of their lives with free access to food. Did they have a systematic tendency to be obese? Because I've never heard of that.
Counts of '800 calories a day' usually exclude the 'special occasion' meals from McDonalds, oddly enough.
35: Men usually have more muscle than women of the same weight which results in higher metabolic rate.
Come to think, Holocaust survivors. Systematically starved for extended periods of time, resulting in a great deal of weight loss. And then lived the rest of their lives with free access to food. Did they have a systematic tendency to be obese? Because I've never heard of that.
There were all sorts of adverse health effects for survivors of the 1944 "Hunger Winter" in the Netherlands. Children who were in utero at the time were more prone to obesity later in life, as well as things like anaemia and kidney problems. There were higher cancer rates later in life for people who were teenagers during the Hunger Winter. Not sure about obesity, though.
I don't care how many assumptions you make about intestinal microflora and metabolic rate: you cannot run an adult human body at steady-state weight on 100 net calories a day.
If you eat enough of the right strains of algae, you can survive partly by photosynthesis. (Although it's only a supplement--humans don't have enough surface area relative to body mass to survive entirely by photosynthesis. 100 net calories is probably still not enough.)
(During the Hunger Winter, of course, thousands of people starved to death while on diets of 800-1200 calories per day, which if this article is to be believed shouldn't really be possible.)
But this would mostly concern people who are already fully grown at the time of deprivation.
"That'll do, Point. That'll do."
I suppose, famine or being deliberately starved happens to people regardless of their prior weight, so mostly previously normal-weight people. So even if that doesn't lead to permanent metabolic change, maybe caloric restriction for people who were previously obese does? That'd be a possible difference.
Completely unscientifically, I'd say I've seen scores of pictures of Holocaust survivors in old age, and by and large they looked pretty much like a cross section of the general population, but very few actually obese. Some slightly overweight, most pretty much middling.
Audrey Hepburn died of cancer in late middle age, which proves nothing, but I'm not aware of a source for cancer rates for people who were teenagers during the Hunger Winter.
I once read a newspaper interview with a Hungarian women who'd survived all the horrors that occurred in 20th cent. central Europe, and she mentioned at one point being in a camp where rations were 500 calories a day, which she described as not enough to live on, but too much to die on. That always stuck in my head.
My question about articles like these (I've read tons of less nuanced versions than this one in the "fat-o-sphere", aka fat activism blogs), is, if one's set point is so predetermined, how is it that one's weight can always go up, but never back down? If one's set point can get revised up, why couldn't it get revised down? I always heard it's hard and unpleasant, but is it really impossible in perpetuity?
IME, being cold makes one lose weight and keep it off. Times in my life when I've been very cold on a regular basis have made it very easy to maintain a weight well below what I think of as my set point, even while eating a decent amount of food. As of now I'm about 5 lbs up on my pre-China weight, and almost 10 lbs up on my "living in frigid rural China weight," and I'm trying to decide if it's something I should fight, or if I need to accept it as my mid 30s weight. I've been half-heartedly trying to lose the weight (like yesterday I didn't put on a sweater even though I was cold), but then I've been balancing out eating healthily by drinking too much and eating bar food.
AIHMHB, endocrine disruptors and whatever other chemicals we get from running plastic through a dishwasher is IMO probably the reason that as a population we've gotten much fatter. That and the absence of worms in our bodies (it's all Jimmy Carter's fault...).
humans don't have enough surface area relative to body mass to survive entirely by photosynthesis
Not with that attitude.
67: Current theory is that gaining weight/having overweight damages the hypothalamus by making it insensitive to leptin. So you become deaf to your body's feedback that it has sufficient energy stored and feel the need to turn up the food stereo(, to violate the analogy ban.)
60
It would also depend on caloric expenditure. I imagine the Dutch winter in the 40s would have much less indoor heating than in late 20th cent. America, and the caloric expenditure to heat the place to be dangerous to someone that calorically deprived. Also, FWIW, I did read something that people who were young children or fetuses during the Dutch winter of 44 were more likely to be obese as adults.
66
Hepburn had a well-documented eating disorder, which might also have contributed to early mortality.
In general though, people claiming to be dangerously starved on 500-1000 calories a day + exercising for hours while still being overweight are extremely common in women's internet forums, and I always view these claims with extreme skepticism. At some point, thermodynamics take over, as ajay pointed out.
69
Is that insensitivity necessarily permanent, or can you re-sensitize your hypothalamus?
I remember from Tooze's WWII book discussion of how forced laborers in Germany were often fed in ways that added up to the required calories on paper but not in practice (maybe something about dominance of starchy vegetables where a lot leached out in boiling? I forget).
It's odd. I thought we were supposed to be learning to take women's accounts of their own experiences seriously.
Aha, found it.
The official ration that was settled on for Soviet prisoners and Ostarbeiter in December 1941 was clearly inadequate for men intended for hard labour. It consisted of a weekly allocation of 16.5 kilos of turnips, 2.6 kilos of 'bread' (made up of 65 per cent red rye, 25 per cent sugar beet waste and 10 per cent straw or leaves), 3 kilos of potatoes, 250 grams of horse-or other scrap meat, 130 grams of fat and 150 grams of Naehrmittel (yeast), 70 grams of sugar and two and a third liters of skimmed milk. The appalling quality of the bread caused serious damage to the digestive tract and resulted in chronic malnutrition. The vegetables had to be cooked for hours before they were palatable, robbing them of most of their nutritional content. Though this was a diet that was, relatively speaking, high in carbohydrates, providing a nominal daily total of 2,500 calories, it was grossly deficient in the fat and protein necessary to sustain hard physical labour. It was certainly not enough to restore half-starved Soviet prisoners to good health. To make matters worse, in the vast majority of the camps nothing like this official ration was ever delivered to the inmates.
"Further research is needed..."
but probably, at least if it only occurs in adulthood.
FYI, in the original NYTimes linked study, the "Biggest Loser" participants started with an average basal metabolic rate of 2400 cal/day, which then dropped to 1900 cal/day after the show and stayed at 1900 cal/day after 6 years despite significant weight regain. Average BMR for Americans is 1500-1700 cal/day. So their basic "setpoint" was still higher than average.
to violate the analogy ban
It's not a ban on figurative language in general!
I think if you're a small enough person (and perhaps exclusively females) you really can get away with what seems like alarmingly low-calorie daily intake, i.e. in the 1200 range. Is it not true?
Speaking of small people and food, did anybody see Ant-Man? I've decided comic-book movies are for other people, but I want to know if he vomits every time he shrinks or, if not, if they explain how the food in his stomach shrinks.
I did not see Ant-Man, but I did just see Civil War, in which he appears, and he shrinks things other than himself (and also other than his stomach contents). So that's part of the deal.
I would have preferred to see the Key and Peele movie about the kitten, but lost the argument with Newt.
Total energy expenditure started at 3800 cal/day pre weight loss and dropped to 3000 cal/day at the end of the show and rebounded to 3400 cal/day 6 years later. These people are still burning (and by identity, eating), far more than the average person.
78: I think it's a fictional physics rather than fictional biological modifications.
It saves me from asking what happens if he swallows something that isn't food.
Guess which one of these two Japanese princesses has just come home from two years' studying in the UK?
I'm guessing that there's something obviously funny about the picture -- one of them is being much more UKish. But I don't see it myself.
Oh, duh, I forgot what thread we were in. I was looking for body-language. Green-dress put on weight in the UK?
Is the third one going to be Princess Tako?
73
But what if I'm a woman too? I'm doing the feminist act of taking my own skepticism seriously...
Yes, in Japanese eyes the younger sister (pink dress) is average size, older sister (green dress) is unpleasantly (and unfittingly for a princess) plump.
84
I had some Chinese-American friends in college who would eat two meals a day of fried chicken strips, garlic bread, corn, and waffles with ice cream. Unsurprisingly, they put on some weight, and blamed it on the "Western diet."
89: Or are you doing that thing that "there's a special place in hell" for? It's so complicated!
That actually sounds like kind of an awesome diet. We used to make waffles with ice cream, but I haven't done it for years.
92
There's a special place in hell for women who doubt other women who judge other women whose intuition is to be skeptical of the claims of other women testifying their personal experience. Did I get that right? Doing math Being a woman is so hard.
94: Yes, that's what all women tell me.
93
Yeah, it looked pretty tasty. My protestant self-control prevented me from eating like that. Oh, and I forgot, there were also waffle fries. Waffles x 2!
Waffle fries are great, but not with ice cream.
There's a special place in hell for women who doubt other women who judge other women whose intuition is to be skeptical of the claims of other women testifying their personal experience.
I believe that, in progressive circles, "lived experience" is the term of art.
Just like a woman to get it wrong.
This is your monthly reminder that somebody opened a Chinese bakery near my house and called it "The Pink Box." The reminders will stop when I stop finding this amusing.
It's like keeping kosher. You eat the waffle fries, you take a break, and then you eat the ice cream.
101
It's like being Italian. First course is fried chicken, waffle fries, corn, and garlic bread. Second course is waffles with ice cream. Third course is antacids.
Speaking of Italian food, my uncle (through marriage) used to eat basically whatever you put near him and he stayed thin his whole life. His son eats healthy and runs and looks so thin that people routinely ask him if he is sick.
Waffle fries are great with ice cream. No temporal separation is needed.
I mean, normal fries are great with ice cream. I can't say that I've ever had waffle fries with ice cream, but I would expect it to be fairly similar.
It's not that I don't value your lived experience, but I'm not eating something I wouldn't have otherwise eaten on your review.
At the end of coding bootcamp, exactly a month ago, I was as heavy as I've ever been at 202 lbs. Since then I've had the same three meals every day, which at a reasonable estimate amount to 1500 calories per day, and I've lost 15 lbs. Since I'm not eating any grains or anything starchy other than bananas, I actually don't even feel hungry most of the time. I'm curious whether the weight loss will taper off even at 1500 calories. (Also, shouldn't we be treating anything from Ancel Keys with extreme suspicion?)
I was as heavy as I've ever been at 202 lbs
Everybody at 202 lbs is as heavy as they can be at 202 lbs.
I thought you'd go for the "same three meals" joke. Respect.
I thought we were supposed to be learning to take women's accounts of their own experiences seriously.
Or, alternatively, learning to stop taking anyone's accounts of their own experiences seriously.
I think if you're a small enough person (and perhaps exclusively females) you really can get away with what seems like alarmingly low-calorie daily intake, i.e. in the 1200 range.
Running the numbers through Kleiber's law, and assuming that the average woman's calorie need is 1500 for basal metabolic rate plus another 500 for activity, a woman weighing about 110lb should need a daily intake of 1200kcal.
110lb is small, but it's not terrifyingly small. In BMI terms that's a woman of normal build who's between 4'10" and 5'5" tall.
Even for someone inactive, basal metabolic rate is not the same as appropriate calorie intake. Basic activities like walking, standing, and sleeping take some calories.
Isn't sleeping covered in "basal"?
Maybe. I have a printout they gave me when I breathed through a tube to measure it via oxygen consumption.
114: yes, I know, I allowed 500 kcal for that, on the basis of typical female BMR being 1500 and target caloric intake being 2000. Our 110lb woman needs 700 kcal to feed her BMR, plus another 500 kcal for activity.
I am happy to be corrected here by someone who actually knows what they're talking about, rather than just working on a 20-year-old memory of a physiology class.
Everybody at 202 lbs is as heavy as they can be at 202 lbs.
If 202-lb Ogged went to Mars, he would be much less heavy than he's ever been at 202 lbs.
Women on my mom's side of the family tend toward the very small. Usually under 5' tall. They don't seem to eat very much at all. If you go to a restaurant with them, you could usually steal something from their plate if you were still hungry after your dinner.
My parents bought furniture for short people. That is, much of the seating is such that somebody 5' tall can sit with their back all the way on the chair and their feet flat on the ground. This means that when my brother-in-law sits on the couch, he looks like he is sitting on furniture for little kids.
123. Can you get me an address for this supplier?
I don't know how far Nebraska Furniture Mart ships.
The author of the study tweeted that he doesn't think the same amount of metabolic damage occurs in less extreme cases. I've read somewhere that the metabolic difference is more like 100 calories or so. That's not nothing, but it's not as extreme as the article makes it out.
66: There's a lot of studies that show that people are really bad at estimating how much they eat. Most people aren't weighing and measuring everything they eat.
126: did you ever get run over by the lady who used to own NFM?
No. My dad said he had a nice conversation with her when he was there buying furniture.
I never got to meet her -- I think she both retired and died during my sojourns there.
And the police thought those were coincidences?
I have a theory of one reason why we're so awful at eating healthily. I think people have categories for food (good for you, bad for you, healthy, etc.). Once a food is generally in that category, it's hard to move mentally/psychologically, and different preparations which radically alter its healthiness or the addition of ingredients doesn't really change how people think. This combined with late capitalism means that once a food is agreed as "healthy," food companies do their darndest to make really unhealthy calorically dense versions. Hence you have people eating pre-packaged granola bars, kale chips, gluten free muffins, etc.
I came up with this theory while working at a coffee shop in the mid 2000s. There were a string of articles in the local paper around that time on how black coffee was low calorie and a metabolism stimulant. I had people (mainly middle aged women) telling me they'd gone back on coffee after they realized it would help them lose weight and then ordering a white chocolate raspberry mocha with whipped cream. Categorically, that is "a coffee," just as a cup of black coffee is "a coffee." Although one has 5 calories and the other 500, mostly from sugar.
127
I've also read something somewhere that the more you eat, the more you underestimate how much you eat.
As long as we're bullshitting about why people gain weight, I think the times in my life when I ate most were also the times when I was incredibly bored and unhappy, and my appetite self-regulated once I solved the bored/unhappy problem. Since most people seem to be incredibly bored and (moderately) unhappy, this extremely rigorous theory which I put forth in great seriousness (like all my comments) likely explains as much as 70% of the rise in obesity. The rest is due to kale chips.
I applaud 133.
As far as "weighing and measuring everything you eat", a simple alternative for a single person is just to record the total calories on every package you bring home from the store. Over a few weeks, even things you don't finish like bags of rice will even out with things you ate but already had on hand. I ended up within a hundred calories of the average I recorded several years later with MyFitnessPal. MyFitnessPal is much cooler, though.
135. What if you mostly eat fresh meat and vegetables and unpackaged bread?
The packaging is low in calories and doesn't weigh much.
